I will have to put in weeks of effort to get what they paid for. Do you think people shouldn't feel aggrieved by this? Time to play video game is a finite resource for most people. Paying to avoid this is an insult to every customer who is forced to slogg through content Blizzard has now deemed so irrelevant and uninteresting they will allow you to pay money to avoid it.

I'm a Forsaken. I kill firstborns while their mamas watch. I turn cities into salt. I even, when I feel like it, rip the souls from little girls, and from now till kingdom come, the only thing you can count on in your existence is never understanding why.

I will have to put in weeks of effort to get what they paid for. Do you think people shouldn't feel aggrieved by this? Time to play video game is a finite resource for most people. Paying to avoid this is an insult to every customer who is forced to slogg through content Blizzard has now deemed so irrelevant and uninteresting they will allow you to pay money to avoid it.

Geez. You might be "forced" to work. Can we please tone down the pathos here. My heart fair bleed. You know what? I have 10 classes at level 90. Now the option arises that I can buy my 11th class right away to lv 90.

Boo hoo hoooo...I just destroyed the game. Especially YOUR game and YOUR enjoyment

Oh wait. I like levelling so much...I will still level my 11th toon to 90 and NOT buy my way to max level.

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

... there are lots of different types of players, with different amounts of time to play, and different tastes for the content and difficulty and time commitment they want to give to any of those pieces of content. The person that plays for an hour or so a few times a week is playing the same game as the person that plays five hours every night.....

okay. how about i set up a scenario with in-game functions. lets say one person has just used this system to get the max amount of max level characters. this means more lockouts, bank space, etc, yes and that in and of itself does not give any unique advantage over the person who does not pay. however, that also means there are 12 farms in half-hill. that means this person can level up profs extremely quickly, as leveling them to current expac level is already easy, and the farm equals free mats with which to level it for current expac. this also means they have the mats for almost anything they want to make, as well as multiple cooldowns across different characters, possibly overlapping ones. now, when these people have gotten their profs and farms maxxed (a matter of very little time in comparison to leveling 12 individual characters, especially if you already have a 90 exalted with the tillers) this means they can make whatever they want, whenever they want. this also means that if they are so inclined they can control the auction house, as that person has a monopoly compared to the one that doesn't pay for 12 characters. and before you say "there aren't people who would do that", yes. there are. then theres the wild AH fluctuations from the connected realms, which didn't alter the player base any, it just put more of them in one place.

So much factual inaccuracy and overestimation, it makes my head spin.

Firstly, 11 spots total, not 12. They are not adding more spots in WoD, they have no currently expressed intention of allowing players to purchase more slots, and thus, only 11. Then you go on to mention having a 90 already Exalted, which implies they have already leveled to 90 once and have already gotten through the content once, thus they aren't a "purchase a server full of 90s", they will have experienced the game. Even if we assume you meant that they charged through to get Exalted with one toon and then jumped on the rest, let us remember several things.

The first toon without a Grand Commendation will take close to 2 weeks to get to Exalted with the Tillers. Pre-Exalted, the amount of farming you can do starts negligible and doesn't improve very fast. Even at Exalted, you have 16 farm slots per day. This means that regardless of what you plant, you can only harvest once per day. Let's assume that you plant Leather (I have much experience planting leather myself, and Leather has less "variant" mats that can be produced than any other save Windwool Cloth). Each seed has the chance to produce between 2 and 4 Leather with a rather small chance at producing a Hide. This means that the average take from a single day of farming leather is 3 leather per seed, at 16 seeds, so a total of roughly 48 leather. Even if we assume a 5% chance to produce a Magnificent Hide, and 11 toons all producing Leather to "power level" Leatherworking, you still end up with 501 Exotic Leather and 9 Magnificent Hides per day. Now, this is using ALL 11 toons to make this pull happen. Assuming you have 1 Leatherworker, you can thus make 1 Magnificent Hide and 1 Hardened Magnificent Hide per day, still leading to needing 28 days to make a pair of pants. Assuming you don't use the leather on the Leatherworker and you sell it, you are effectively selling what a single skinner can farm in roughly 1.5 hrs after using all 11 toons. Not exactly economy breaking. Also, at the rate this pulls, it will still take several days of using only this method to max out your Leatherworking and your leatherworker will still need to either farm some Spirits of Harmony him/herself or play the game, thus learning the class, because maxing a profession is far, far more difficult without spending some Spirits of Harmony to purchase the more guaranteed recipes from a vendor. What does this equate to? An gross overestimation of what having 11 maxed farms can give you per day. Things get worse when speaking about farming herbs since, in an average day on one farm, you could end up with only 4 or 5 of each available herb with poor RNG, not really allowing for either Milling for Inscription if you only get 4 of an herb or making many potions regardless of how many you get. Thus making leveling Alchemy and Inscription via this method without open world farming virtually limitless in how long it will take.

The point here is that trying to justify how buying a full server of 11 90s would be an "advantage" due to in game economics is a poor idea. Those purchased toons would have no start up capital to their names to play the AH, they would be forced to play for gear to even be able to effectively farm and they would need to level their professions. Thus farm, only Blacksmithing is levelable from 1 to 600 via only Pandaria mats, and the requirement to level that is somewhere just over 4700 bars of Ghost Iron, which is roughly 9400 Ghost Iron Ore. What this means is, assuming an average of 3 Ore per seed and you were the luckiest person in the world and got no Kyparite or Trillium Ore, even with 11 90s with maxed out farms, it would take you roughly 18 days to accumulate enough ore to level Blacksmithing without outside farming. And the likelihood of getting nothing but Ghost Iron on 11 farms in 16 plots per farm for 18 days is basically non-existent. What this all means is that you would still have to play your toons that have no start up capital to farm the low level mats through old content to gather the mats to level your professions to a point where you could even use Pandaria mats farmed from your farm. Thus negating the arguments that you won't see content and that you can gain some unholy, ridiculous economic advantage. On top of that, the people who have the economic advantage in game are the people who are gold capped on multiple toons and who already currently monopolize the AH. Take a look at your local server's AH. On average for certain gems or flasks or potions or enchants, I will put money on there being only a hand full of people selling. Having some purchased 90s with no gold will not suddenly change that fact.

As to the argument about "well, now I have so many more cooldowns and look how much faster I can make Tailoring gear", you forget one major major thing. On US Hyjal alone, Spirits of War sell for only 150g. For a smallish investment, a single person could purchase enough Spirits to make that Belt or those Pants via Tailoring in a single day. Your rationale to justify it via CDs is invalid. Coupled with the fact that, sure you can speed up using only your normal daily cooldowns how fast you can make gear. Except for 1 major flaw in your logic. Let's assume you are making the 553 Cloth gear, both a DPS and a healing set for your Priest. Now, you have stated that it would take only 28 days to make both sets with 4 maxed tailors. The logical flaw here is that, a) you would need to level 4 tailors to max which will either take a ridiculous investment of capital to buy all the cloth needed or you will have to farm the cloth yourself which, having leveled tailoring through the Netherweave and Frostweave levels, will take a very long time to do 4 times over. b) you will spend 28 days to complete 2 belts and 2 pairs of pants for your priest. In that time you will have at least 4, possibly 5 lock outs in SoO that you could potentially pass through. This means that you have between 4 and 5 chances to get a belt or pants to drop, thus making your grind for tailoring gear pointless. c) on the first day you are 90, you can go to the Timeless Isle, kill a Celestial, and potentially get your 553 Tier pants. d) It is still only 2 slots worth of gear that you just spent a month crafting. What about the other 14 slots that need items? You cannot craft those. So you still don't gain THAT huge an advantage.

Trying to use in game economic reasons to justify why this is horrible is like trying to justify why the level cap should only 95 instead of 100 because of your personal love of multiples of 5 instead of 10. It is trivial and pointless and has zero long term impact on the game.

Now for the silver lining to this scenario you've set up. The person most likely to purchase a server full of lvl 90 toons is going to be a brand new player. It likely won't be a veteran player as a veteran would either have toons already or be able to level quickly and not see the need to purchase because they know what the leveling situation is like timewise. If a new player is going to invest that much money into the game when they are first starting in an effort to gain some economic advantage, imagine the daily time investment to farming and do cooldowns on 11 toons every day. Minimum of an hour played to get it all done and, in getting it all done, they still haven't even played the game. Which means even more time spent, which means more people playing the game a great deal and getting hooked. This means more longer subscribers. That is a good thing.

One last issue I have with more of the arguments made in this thread. You keep saying things like, "Well, for only $25, why wouldn't you just buy a 90 even if you were a veteran player?" This assumes something important, that the cost would only be $25 USD. If the only other means to getting a server full of free 90s is to buy and create another account with WoD and then account transfer them, you are looking at, for every lvl 90, $20 spent on the Battle Chest (assuming it only contains through Cata, as people are complaining about this happening before MoP officially ends), $20 for MoP, $40 for WoD and then another, what? $25 per toon to account transfer. That means that every single "free" 90 will actually cost about $105 per toon. So for a full server full of 90s, it will set someone back roughly $1,155. That doesn't strike me as very "free". Also, if it is $105 to make a toon in this fashion, do you honestly think Blizzard would charge ONLY $25 for an instant 90? Likely the charge would be around $60-75. Because that way, you the consumer are still saving money compared to the alternative way of doing it.

TL;DR - There is no reasonable or realistic economic advantage to actually gain from having a server full of insta-90s that have no professions and no cash. And these "free" 90s aren't really all that free considering how much you'd have to spend to get a server full using the "buy lots of WoD copies and transfer" method (ie, $105 per 90).

Glad you see it my way. Being forced to do something that people can avoid with money is most annoying.

I'm a Forsaken. I kill firstborns while their mamas watch. I turn cities into salt. I even, when I feel like it, rip the souls from little girls, and from now till kingdom come, the only thing you can count on in your existence is never understanding why.

They are selling them, but the price is high enough for me not to be bothered. In fact, there is so much in the game to do I wouldn't be that bothered if they began selling it for $10 per character after you hit your first 90. The slippery slope argument is correct, it's just that I don't think selling high level characters is damaging to the game at this point.

That said, I will be playing TESO as well, or at least plan to, if they do emphasise the RPG elements as much as is touted. I don't see WoW as a classic RPG anymore, it has eliminated too many of the core elements of this type of game. It's a fantasy MMOG. Not saying this is good or bad, but if you want an RPG, you will go for something different.

RPGs tend to involve much more involved character design and decision-making with respect to this, a la D&D, ideally allowing a broad variety of choices, as well as cookie-cutter builds.

Last edited by Zathrendar; 2014-01-18 at 12:08 AM.

Start trying to work out who deserves what, and before long you’ll spend the rest of your days weeping for each and every person in the world.

With the Scroll of Resurrection you could create an instant level 80 with a full set of greens. This is practically no different, only that it's open to all players instead of returning players. Not to mention it takes less than a week to level a character to the level cap using recruit a friend.

You were always going to be able to "buy" a level 90 character come WoD. It was just going to take buying another account and attaching WoD to it, then transferring the level 90 to your main account. It would be expensive, but it would have been possible, and Blizz knew this so they just said "Well fuck it, lets just let them buy it from us directly instead of them going through all the trouble of buying a whole new account."

And thus the forums went mad and made a mountain out of a crater.

Plus, there is zero correlation between the in-game shop and the paid boost to 90, aside from the fact that they released a new mount and announced the paid 90 in the same week.

With the Scroll of Resurrection you could create an instant level 80 with a full set of greens. This is practically no different, only that it's open to all players instead of returning players. Not to mention it takes less than a week to level a character to the level cap using recruit a friend.

You were always going to be able to "buy" a level 90 character come WoD. It was just going to take buying another account and attaching WoD to it, then transferring the level 90 to your main account. It would be expensive, but it would have been possible, and Blizz knew this so they just said "Well fuck it, lets just let them buy it from us directly instead of them going through all the trouble of buying a whole new account."

And thus the forums went mad and made a mountain out of a crater.

Plus, there is zero correlation between the in-game shop and the paid boost to 90, aside from the fact that they released a new mount and announced the paid 90 in the same week.

So Blizzard are saying "If you wanted to pay extra and get another copy of the game, then pay extra to transfer that boosted character across to your main account, you will do that. So we might as well offer a paid level 90 feature, since our other paid features let you do it anyway". To me that just shows how warped the whole thing has become because of introducing paid features in a subscription game.

They are now using their own PAID features to argue why it is a good idea to introduce more PAID features. You can bet that they are extending this thinking further; because then it almost becomes logical to offer more paid features; everything starts to hang together nicely. Except, of course, for the fact this is all happening in a subscription game.

Certainly starts to feel like a slippery slope to me.

When challenging a Kzin, a simple scream of rage is sufficient. You scream and you leap.

Over the last 10 years, Blizzard has taken over $10bn from MMO players. Take a look around your game...do you see $10bn worth of content available to you? Do you see even a tiny fraction of that in relevant content? Now ask me again why I dislike what Blizzard has done to the MMO industry.

Having the OPTION to buy a level 90 character (level cap will be 100 in WoD so you'll still have to level anyway and learn your class) is in no way 'pay to win' unless you actually find leveling up to be "winning" which in this game is just not the case. You still have the option to level your own characters, no one is forcing you to participate in it. You don't get any additional bonuses by doing this that you wouldn't get by leveling your own character. (other than saving some time in exchange for some extra cash) People really like to moan and whine about every little thing these days. Call me if they ever offer high end raiding gear or PvP gear then maybe you might have a point but an option to skip mindless leveling? I don't see the problem.

I love that post by Bashiok. Hey guys we are going to sell lvl 90's to milk already paying customers and it's your fault. What a bunch of goddamn heroes they are. They use a scenario that only the most hardcore would use to justify it. *shock horror gasp* Not only will people eat it up but will thank them for it while Blizzard laughs all the way to the bank. Fucking geniuses they are. You have to admire them.

I'm a Forsaken. I kill firstborns while their mamas watch. I turn cities into salt. I even, when I feel like it, rip the souls from little girls, and from now till kingdom come, the only thing you can count on in your existence is never understanding why.

I can understand why people are okay with free 90s. I can understand why people are not okay with free 90s. But I don't agree with paying for a free 90, it shows that the developers have given up on enhancing the leveling experience and how much they have fallen from being the leading MMO on the market.

It seems to me, as time keeps passing by, that the developers are more interested in providing more micro transactions and cash shop items instead of delivering quality content to their player base. They are finding more ways to take money off them instead of delivering content for the monthly fee they pay for.

So Blizzard are saying "If you wanted to pay extra and get another copy of the game, then pay extra to transfer that boosted character across to your main account, you will do that. So we might as well offer a paid level 90 feature, since our other paid features let you do it anyway". To me that just shows how warped the whole thing has become because of introducing paid features in a subscription game.

They are now using their own PAID features to argue why it is a good idea to introduce more PAID features. You can bet that they are extending this thinking further; because then it almost becomes logical to offer more paid features; everything starts to hang together nicely. Except, of course, for the fact this is all happening in a subscription game.

Certainly starts to feel like a slippery slope to me.

Yes. They are adding a separate paid feature to remove the hassle of going through 3 different paid features. It saves both the customer and Blizzard time and money. Full stop. It has nothing to do with them selling heroic tier gear on the item shop.

We have already seen more mounts than every in the cash shop and the trend will continue. Time to buckle up or get off the ride as we have just begun the trip down the rabbit hole.

Alright Oprah, let's chill out on the "WHOA NELLY". 2 were released in this patch through the cash shop, 4+ were added in-game. 3-4 have also been added in all the other major patches too that were in-game only.

I know, math is hard and it's easy to just cry wolf to make things seem worse than they are.

I can understand why people are okay with free 90s. I can understand why people are not okay with free 90s. But I don't agree with paying for a free 90, it shows that the developers have given up on enhancing the leveling experience and how much they have fallen from being the leading MMO on the market.

It seems to me, as time keeps passing by, that the developers are more interested in providing more micro transactions and cash shop items instead of delivering quality content to their player base. They are finding more ways to take money off them instead of delivering content for the monthly fee they pay for.

If they haven't tried that with Cataclysm, I will probably be in the same shoe and protesting on the forums on them neglecting leveling environments.

Blizzard did try, Cataclysm turned out to be the expansion everyone hates, with too few zones and destroyed the entire Azeroth that we know of. Considering ICC put people on ice for a WHOLE YEAR, Blizzard had enough time for development, but it just wasn't enough. Too few people goes through leveling content anymore, the investment simply isn't worth it.

"Well they can make it better so players will actually level!" Sadly the MMO player pool no longer support Blizzard trying to get new players. They need old players back, they want the old players back. The ones with disposable cash, less time per day for games, you know those people with jobs? New players ain't going to spend time going through 90 levels with a 10 year old game.

If they were worried about people abusing box purchases, then why dont they make this a promotional offer? Limited time only, that way you lessen the impact of box buying and dont create a rift in the community (again) at the same time.

Alright Oprah, let's chill out on the "WHOA NELLY". 2 were released in this patch through the cash shop, 4+ were added in-game. 3-4 have also been added in all the other major patches too that were in-game only.

I know, math is hard and it's easy to just cry wolf to make things seem worse than they are.

3-4 every major patch you say? I guess math is hard as i don't see dozens of mounts in the store. Guess mine is broken. I do see 4 they have added this expansion so far and i will admit to being a bit unsure about the rest but no more than 2 per other expansion?

I'm a Forsaken. I kill firstborns while their mamas watch. I turn cities into salt. I even, when I feel like it, rip the souls from little girls, and from now till kingdom come, the only thing you can count on in your existence is never understanding why.

3-4 every major patch you say? I guess math is hard as i don't see dozens of mounts in the store. Guess mine is broken. I do see 4 they have added this expansion so far and i will admit to being a bit unsure about the rest but no more than 2 per other expansion?

My inability to read properly aside they have already added double the mounts in the cash shop. That was my initial point.

I'm a Forsaken. I kill firstborns while their mamas watch. I turn cities into salt. I even, when I feel like it, rip the souls from little girls, and from now till kingdom come, the only thing you can count on in your existence is never understanding why.